One bad experience can sour expectations for similar interactions

Based on the research of Annabelle Roberts

Anyone who has opened the door of a vacation rental after a long trip, only to find it hasn’t been cleaned as promised, knows the burn of betrayal.

That traveler is more likely to distrust the proprietor of their next vacation rental, according to new research from Annabelle Roberts, assistant professor of marketing at the McCombs School of Business at The University of Texas at Austin.

The same reaction could happen after a customer service representative provides incorrect information or a rideshare driver fails to show up, she says. Consumers transfer the negative experience to the next service rep or driver they encounter.

“We’re trusting people all the time, whether we think about it that way or not,” Roberts says. “There are many situations where consumers need to decide whether to trust an unknown person, and they may use previous interactions with other people in similar settings as a reference point.”

Deciding To Trust or Distrust

To understand the ripple effect of a single trust experience, Roberts, along with Emma Levine and Jane Risen of the University of Chicago, conducted 21 studies involving nearly 12,000 people.

Ten were online games that involved exchanging cash between paired participants and later making trust decisions with different partners.

In the remaining 11 studies, participants read real-world scenarios, such as asking a co-worker to keep a secret or lending an object to a neighbor. After learning whether their trust had been kept or violated, they rated how likely they were to trust a different person in a comparable situation.

Analyses across all the studies confirmed that people learned attitudes from a single trust interaction, whether positive or negative.

Those who had interacted with someone who proved trustworthy were more likely to trust another person in a similar interaction later.
If the partner or colleague proved untrustworthy, people felt exploited and were less likely to trust later.

Roberts found two reasons for the reactions. One is emotional: Untrustworthy interactions don’t feel good, and we want to avoid them in the future.

The other is perceptual. We tend to view others as part of a group, so a bad experience with one rideshare driver might lead to similar feelings about all rideshare drivers down the road.

“You’re updating your beliefs about the population with each interaction that you have,” Roberts says.

Easy To Burn, Hard To Build

Bad experiences were harder to dispel, the study found. The rise in distrust was about double the boost in trust after a good exchange. Distrust was especially acute if trust had been exploited — that is, after trusting another person who turned out to be untrustworthy.

Although the studies focused on trust in individuals rather than organizations, the findings have lessons for customer service, Roberts says. Individual business owners can be aware that customers may have been burned before. They can try to engender trust — such as an Airbnb host who responds to problems quickly.

If a customer remains suspicious, it may reflect past interactions with others, she adds. “If you’re a business owner and someone is untrusting of you, it’s not necessarily a reflection of anything you’ve done. It may be that their perception of you is colored by interactions they had in the past with businesses like yours.”

Surprisingly, the same effects do not occur with artificial intelligence. When humans were paired in games with algorithms, their trust levels didn’t fall, even when an algorithm kept all their money and failed to give any back.

“This trust effect is specific to social interactions,” Roberts says. “People don’t lump AI agents together, because they don’t see those interactions as social.”

“Learning to Distrust: One Trust Experience Changes the Expected Value of Trust” is published in Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.

Story by Sally Parker